Daisy’s friends remember her as a tough but caring, big-hearted teenager who overcame significant obstacles from a young age. She always put on a smile no matter what, was quick to lend a hand to those in need, and often prioritized her friends and loved ones’ problems before her own. But her life began to change in high school, and before anyone realized the extent of it, she’d found herself in horrible danger.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: What hidden stories does Yazoo Clay hold?
In Mississippi, Yazoo Clay keeps secrets. 7,000 bodies out there or more. A forgotten asylum cemetery.
It was my family's mystery.
Shame, guilt, propriety. Something keeps it all buried deep. Until it's not. I'm Larison Campbell, and this is Under Yazoo Clay. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
This episode contains descriptions of intimate partner violence. Please listen with care.
The person that Lali went to school with was Daisy. They met in the seventh grade when they had homeroom together. For some reason, we ended up sitting on the same table and we ended up talking, you know? And to me, she was really beautiful. She had beautiful eyes. Her eyes are what caught my attention. I was like, wow. And we started getting close. She was so, like, nice, caring.
She would always ask me, like, you know, like, those type of outgoing friends, how are you doing? How are you feeling? When I would talk to her, it was all like smiles, you know, like laughs and smiles and everything. And then we ended up getting closer in eighth grade because I had her for PE.
Junior high was more than a decade ago for Lolly. She's in her early 20s now. She's got wavy brown hair parted down the middle. And on the day that we met, she wore a Whitney Houston T-shirt. She wants to be a nurse someday, delivering babies. But for the time being, she delivers something else. Food from local restaurants. That's in between classes at East LA College.
I first reached out to Lali on TikTok. Her profile is filled with funny, candid videos. Nothing too edited, nothing too trendy. Just snippets of everyday life. A friend walking around with a paper bag over her head. Soccer teammates banging on plastic bottles to make an ASMR drumbeat. Lali and I met up at a coffee shop in Huntington Park.
It's a working-class suburb just a few miles south of downtown Los Angeles. We sat at an outdoor table on Pacific Boulevard, the main shopping district. It's filled with signs in Spanish advertising tax lawyers and passport photos. There are huge, glittery boutiques that sell tuxedos and princess-like quinceañera dresses.
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Chapter 2: Who was Daisy and how did she impact her friends?
But the thing that everybody noticed about him was his earlobes. They'd been stretched and gauged with jewelry. It looked like big black discs. His appearance didn't bother Susie. She was actually suspicious of him for another reason. He was too quiet, she told me. And pretty soon, she began to notice things about him that made her suspect he was a lot older than 17.
I saw tattoos on him, she told me. A lot of tattoos. And I'm like, how old is he for real? Susie would later discover that her daughter had lied to her about her boyfriend's age. He was already 21 when Daisy was 15. Susie had always felt like she and her daughter were on a team. But after Victor came into the picture, she no longer felt that way. It seemed like everything had changed.
Susie had been working long hours to make ends meet. She was seeing less and less of her daughter. And when they did hang out, Daisy never wanted to talk about Victor, Susie told me. A number of Daisy's friends told me the same thing. That Victor was a topic that was always off limits. They didn't know much about him, and they weren't even really sure how the two of them met.
But they knew better than to ask about it. When they did, Daisy sometimes told them that he wasn't worth talking about. But Victor clearly didn't feel that way about Daisy. It was like he wanted the whole world to know about his relationship. Because on Instagram, he filled his grid with photos of her... Daisy with her hair bleached blonde and then dyed jack-o'-lantern orange.
Daisy and fishnets climbing a fence. Daisy and fishnets on a beach. Daisy in an antique shop. A little yellow Daisy propped in the buttonhole of her jean jacket. His Instagram contained a few photos of himself, too. There was one photo that showed off his tattoos. On his leg, an image of Jason, the killer from Friday the 13th. Two blades arranged like crossbones under a hockey mask.
Across his abdomen, an outline of the Grim Reaper. It seemed like he had a thing for horror movies, right down to the clothes he wore. He even sometimes dressed like Freddy Krueger in a red striped sweater and bowler hat. His look sometimes freaked people out. Like Jose Tejas, the apartment manager at Daisy's building. He'd sometimes see Victor hanging around the apartment complex with Daisy.
And he was not into it. He dressed in all black, like a shadow, Jose said. Then he compared Victor to The Undertaker, the wrestler who entered the ring in a black leather trench coat and top hat. Daisy's style had become a little theatrical, too. Her hair was cut short and asymmetrical, and her makeup was dark and bold. She looked a little like the 1980s punk singer, Susie Sue.
By her junior year of high school, she had changed her look so much that Lolly, her friend from middle school, had to do a double take when she spotted Daisy on the bus.
I only recognized her because of her eyes. Her appearance was completely different. Her hair was dyed, her makeup was like, at that moment to me it was like a little like, I thought about it crazy in a sense, you know? But now that I think about it, it's not crazy, it was just her expressing how she felt, you know?
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Chapter 3: How did Daisy's friendship with Lali evolve over time?
When you peel back the layers of Mississippi's Yazoo clay, nothing's ever as simple as you think.
The story is much more complicated and nuanced than that.
I'm Larison Campbell. Listen to Under Yazoo Clay on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
One night, during the summer before Daisy's senior year of high school, her grandfather, Juan de la O, was asleep on the couch. Daisy's younger brother began screaming at him to wake up.
Juan said that his grandson shouted, It's Victor. He hit Daisy. Daisy's mother, Susie, was in the car on her way home.
She got a call from her youngest son and heard him shouting. He hit her. He hit her with a skateboard. When Susie got to the apartment complex, she saw blood on the ground. But Daisy was nowhere to be found. She'd taken off running, just like Victor. To Susie, it seemed like Daisy was embarrassed. Embarrassed that her younger brother had witnessed what had happened.
She was such a mature, rough girl, Susie told me. That for her, that was embarrassing that she was getting hit by this person. Daisy's mother and her grandfather and her little brother began running after Daisy and Victor, chasing them down the street. Victor eventually got away. When they caught up with Daisy, she was distraught.
The public spectacle of her family chasing her and her boyfriend down the street, it probably added to her embarrassment. And the last thing she wanted to do was to talk about what had happened, or even to seek treatment for it. Susie pleaded with her daughter. She wanted to see the wound on her head, but Daisy wouldn't show her. She was covering it with a hat. You need stitches, Susie told her.
But Daisy did not want to go to the hospital. It seemed like she was afraid of reporting the assault, afraid of drawing even more attention to her injury and what that might mean for her relationship. Finally, Susie made a promise. She told her daughter that she wouldn't call the police. She was bluffing. She had actually already called the police.
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